By the end of 2012
there will be more
mobile devices than
people on the planet.
This data point from
Cisco Systems about
our changing world is not mentioned in Lee
Rainie and Barry Wellman’s excellent new
book. There are two reasons for the omission:
First, the statistic about cell phones is
global, and Rainie and Wellman’s research
focuses on North America. Second, the stat
doesn’t come from either of their institutions,
Pew Research Center’s Internet &
American Life Project (Rainie) and NetLab
at the University of Toronto (Wellman).

Just about every other fact—both quantitative
and qualitative—about how the Internet
(particularly broadband), mobile phones,
and social networking are changing our lives
can be found in Networked. The book provides
analysis of the mounds of data they
have collected over the years and weaves an
argument that should have a long tablet life.

Rainie and Wellman do this by firmly anchoring
the vast amount of survey data that
Pew collects and the ethnographic research
conducted by NetLab in a long view of institutional
change. Social networking does not
begin with Facebook, they argue.
Facebook is merely this moment’s
representation of a much longer
set of behaviors.

Now, Rainie and Wellman argue,
we are experiencing a “triple
revolution” wrought by the advent
of broadband Internet access,
social networks, and mobile technologies.The mutually reinforcing
and accelerating nature of
these technologies is shifting the center of
gravity in how we organize as a society. Institutions—both formal, such as schools,
and informal, such as families—were once
at the center of our societies. Now we are.
Each of us, with our mobile phones, is connecting
across and within institutional
boundaries. The result, which the authors
call “networked individualism,” is profound.
Where we once organized our communities,
work, family, educational, and governance
systems around institutions, we are increasingly
navigating the world as connected individuals.
The authors support this assertion
with data and ethnographic research on
device usage, information navigation,
workplace changes, and
economic influence.

One change that Rainie and
Wellman point to is the loss of
the family telephone. Americans
and Canadians increasingly rely
on cell phones, and more of us
are cutting our landlines. As we
do, each member of the household
becomes, in effect, her own
number. With this comes an increasing flexibility.
It also signals one more way in which
these technologies can atomize our behavior.

I picked this example from the many presented
in the book because it seems so insignificant, so tiny. But the cumulative impact of
mobile broadband is being built on change at
this minute level. Because of the ease of connecting,
we are members of many more
groups today, but our engagement lasts for
shorter periods of time. We belong to many
communities and shift our allegiances to institutions
much faster and more often.

A society organized around individuals
may need different rules from one organized
around institutions. We can see signs
of this in philanthropy and social enterprise.
Crowdfunding platforms cater to individual
projects and the networks of people they
can motivate to support them—no intermediary
organization is needed. Flash mobs of
activists, whether taking on dictatorial governments
or cleaning beaches, rely on connections
across diverse networks of individuals,
not on organizational databases.

The Canadian-American novelist William
Gibson has said, “The future is already
here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Rainie and Wellman’s data clearly show the
benefits from the triple revolution of broadband
Internet, social networks, and mobile
technologies. But the same factors that
make networks powerful—their reach and
diversity—make exclusion from them problematic.
Pew and NetLab will continue to
track the spread of these tools and postulate
the benefits of access to them. But who will
analyze those left out of the networks? And
will the disruptive nature of these networks
on the workplace, education, health care, information,
and governance make it harder
for the non-networked to catch up? The
growth of the networks is exponential.
What needs to be done to make sure the effects
of exclusion are not also exponential,
creating a chasm that cannot be bridged?

Lucy Bernholz is a visiting scholar at Stanford
University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.